He often did, Mjiska knew. Not for any lack of lovers, or lack of opportunity… but such encounters were fleeting, never serious in nature. Aerk, she suspected, still blamed himself for Sven’s death so many years ago—Sven’s murder, gone unpunished and unavenged. Since then, he had contented himself with one sword-brother after another, when the mood so took him.
She wondered, in her last waking thought before sleep fully claimed her, if what she’d said to Eyn—“We must each do our part.”—and Eyn’s question as to whether that meant Mjiska would also marry… if that further applied to Aerk himself. Unlike old Ypsvik, their father the Boarstooth had not much expected grandchildren.
The rain ended by morning, the sun dawning golden in a fine clear spring sky. It could not shed much beauty over the salt-marsh where they’d come ashore, but the sea rolled dark blue trimmed with white foam. Gulls wheeled and larks twittered. To the west and north, hills climbed toward dense green woodland.
The reef over which the White-Bristle’s hull had scraped was all but invisible now, just the tops of its ridges and spires poking up through the high tide like the tines of a black comb. Past it, the sea was an even darker blue yet, suggesting depth beyond measure.
Aerk left a few men to guard the ship and look after the livestock and horses. The stretch of coast might seem deserted, he reminded them, but the tales told by Leif Eriksson and his men had made mention of skraelings, strange people who dressed only in animal skins. The rest went out in pairs and small groups to explore. They needed wood and fresh water, they needed a better place to make camp, and they needed to know what resources this new land offered as well as what dangers it held.
Pretty Eyn was the first of them to find the river. “By nearly falling into it,” Njallan reported, his teasing tone and his smile making Eyn blush.
“We’ll name it for her, then,” said Aerk. “The river Eyn, or Eyn’s river.”
She blushed again, but seemed pleased.
They saw no signs of skraelings, and no signs that ships of their countrymen had been here before. There was some game for the hunt and it seemed ample fish for the catching. Both stone and timber were plentiful. Although they found no grape-vines, there were fruit trees and berries. Grasses grew for good grazing, and wild grain grew as well. And where those would grow, so too could wheat and barley be sown.
At the mouth of Eyn’s river, where the headland curved to form a natural harbor inside the black reef’s palisade, was where they decided to move their ship and their camp.
Then, of a night when a half-moon hung in the sky and the waves rippled silver-sheened far out toward the horizon, young Bari, Bragir’s son, raised the alarm.
Bragir, a sailor and good fisherman, a strong back at the oar, had volunteered himself and his wife and sons to sleep aboard the White-Bristle and keep watch over the ship until their own house was built.
At the boy’s frantic cries, everyone else rapidly awoke. They sprang from their sleeping-furs and blankets, seizing up shields and weapons near at hand. Swords sang from their sheaths.
Few had brought mail-coats and there was no time to don them. Some men grabbed for their helms. Mothers drew their children to their sides. Aerk bade a dozen warriors stay; the rest, Mjiska, Eyn and Geira among them, would accompany him.
Bari’s voice was cut silent with violent abruptness.
They rushed out expecting to see the slim shapes of skraeling hide-boats on the water, or a dragon-prowed longship, or some other such threat.
Instead, they saw the White-Bristle listing, half-submerged in the harbor.
Bragir’s boy, they found on the beach. His clothes were wet and sand-speckled, stinking of rotten fish. He sprawled face-down on his belly and when they turned him over his head lolled so loosely they knew his poor neck was broken. His dead eyes stared and his dead mouth gaped with a look of such horror that brave men recoiled.
Bragir himself, they found drowned and floating. His wife Olga and their other son were nowhere to be seen. The White-Bristle’s hull was wreckage and ruin, great holes ringed by the sheared-off edges of planks that looked almost gnawed, shark-bitten.
“Who did this?” Aerk shouted. “Show yourselves!”
Eyn pointed and screamed.
Pointed to the sea.
For, from the sea they came.
The stench of them—brine and fish and decay—was revolting.
The sight of them was far more so.
They came hunched and squelching, with clumsy, hopping gaits. The surf hissed and gurgled around them as they waded ashore. Twenty of them, twenty at least, emerged, and more bobbing heads surfaced further out in the direction of the reef.
Moonlight and torchlight showed the creatures well in all their grotesqueness—skin both pallid and greenish, misshapen limbs ending in splayed and webbed extremities more like claw-tipped flippers than hands or feet, thick and flabby necks where gill-slits pulsed and flapped obscenely, the black orbs of eyes bulging.
Some wore scraps of kelp or sea-plants like garments; others were naked, slime-coated and hideous. A few carried weapons of sorts, crude implements fashioned from coral, driftwood and bone.
Fishlike… froglike… manlike… a vile mingling of the three… yet it made no matter.
“Kill them!” Enraged, Aerk charged.
Mjiska was moving almost before her brother, shells and pebbles crunching underfoot. Olaf, Olga’s brother, anguished for his young nephew, was close on her heels, shrieking wordless fury.
The rest followed, and they met the advancing repugnant host in the clash and clamor of battle. Blades swung. Whalebone spears splintered on iron-bound limewood. Steel met sharp-edged coral. Sharp-edged coral met leather and flesh. Steel met pallid, greenish skin.
Red blood and watery ichor flowed.
The blood was hot. The ichor, cold.
Aerk’s sword, Gore-Tusk, their father’s sword, opened a fishman’s throat from gill-flap to gill-flap. Mjiska hacked another at the shoulder with such an axe-blow that the slimy arm was severed. She kicked it aside as she stepped forward to bury the curved, honed edge in its inhuman skull.
A driftwood club studded with pointed spirals of shell split the battered bronze of Dunvik’s old helm and sent him half-senseless to his knees. A serrated coral knife plunged into Thurvald’s chest, grating audibly on the ribs. He coughed his crimson death-breath defiantly into his killer’s face.
Olaf’s sword was wrenched from his grasp but he, in a near-berserker’s madness, went at his foe weaponless. Even as its hook-clawed hands shredded his linen night-shirt, his fingers gouged into its bulbous black eyes and they burst like overripe fruits, popping in sprays of clammy fluid.
A fishman seized Giera by the hair, dragging her toward the water as she thrashed and scrabbled and spat and swore. Eyn threw herself at its legs and drove a long dagger through the webbing of its toes, spiking its flipper-foot to the packed wet sand.
Two of the creatures overpowered Freyulf and bore him to the ground, where he howled in agony as they savaged him with teeth like bent and crooked needles. A third lunged at Aerk, jaws snapping, and earned a mouthful of Gore-Tusk’s blade instead.
Njallan, roaring, swept his great-sword in a hewing arc of carnage. Fish-scales and ichor flecked his wheat-colored beard. Dunvik, dazed and with blood dribbling from his ear, shed the remnants of his helm. He tried to rise, tottered, and went again to his knees.
Mjiska and Ypsvik fought their way to where another fishman had hold of both Eyn and Geira, each by an ankle. The one who still had Geira by the hair would not relinquish its prize, tugging her between them as its toe-webbing ripped. Mjiska solved the problem of its pinned foot for it by chopping through the squat, froggy leg. Ypsvik, grey of hair and beard but still a warrior, shield-bashed the other, knocked it flat, stood on its gilled neck, and stabbed it through the guts.
A squalling noise sounded, a shell-horn being blown. At that signal, the surviving fishfolk retreated. Those that were able blunder
ed clumsily back toward the sea as fast as they could.
Aerk and Njallan gave chase, cutting four more of them down as they ran. When Aerk saw that a fifth would, despite its graceless gait, gain the surf’s safety before it was within reach of his blade, he stooped without missing a step and snatched up from the wave-strewn pebbles a discarded whalebone spear. He hurled it mid-stride and it did not miss its mark.
Then the battle was done.
Corpses littered the beach. Three of them were men, Thurvald and Freyulf and Hruni the Bald. But they had left many times their number on the wet sand. Wounded fishfolk squirmed, mewling and burbling, until they were bludgeoned to death or beheaded.
Dunvik lay unconscious. Olaf bled freely. Of the rest, some bore slight injuries and some were for the most part unscathed. Bringing the bodies of their fallen companions—including those of drowned Bragir and his boy—they hastened to the place where they’d made camp.
The piles of planks and lumber they’d already cut in preparation of the building of houses they threw together now in a defensive wall. More torches were lit, some on long poles stuck into the ground, and bonfires were kindled until the flames crackled high. Watches were posted. The injured were tended and the dead set aside, covered until they could be decently pyre-burned or buried.
There was much talk, and much desperate debate. They could not simply leave, not with the White-Bristle damaged… and, indeed, already the fishfolk had towed the stricken ship further out so that it sank in the harbor. If they fled, it would have to be inland… but that would mean abandoning Olga and her younger boy to a suspected but uncertain fate.
Eyn was the one to ask what they all had been wondering.
“What are those foul things?”
“Sea-trolls?” suggested Geira. “Or spawn of Jormungandr, the world-circling serpent?”
“What they are not is wave-maidens, Njord’s lovely daughters,” Njallan said, grimacing.
“I have heard tales of deep ones such as these,” said silver-haired Ulrunn, who was besides old Ypsvik the eldest among them.
“Go on,” Aerk told her.
“Before Odin cast Jormungandr into the sea, even before the Aesir and Vanir made peace, the oceans were ruled by giants far more ancient than our own gods. They came from a realm beyond Jotunheim, where Yggdrasil’s furthermost roots and branches can scarcely span.”
“We haven’t time for skald’s stories!” Olaf interrupted. He sat bare-chested, bloodied bandages bound around the worst of his wounds. The shallower cuts from the fishman’s claws looked inflamed from the touch of the slime, the flesh puffing, the skin reddened.
“Let her speak,” Mjiska said.
He glowered but gave no more argument, and Ulrunn went on.
“The lord of these giants was called Father Daakon, and his queen Mother Heydra, and they were Njord’s bitter enemies. With Odin’s help, and that of all the Aesir, they were banished to the depths, to the black trenches. But there they bred countless hideous children, who defied the gods’ exile to seek prey and plunder upon the dry land.”
By then the moon had set and the night-time was waning, but the sentries saw strange blue-green glows and movement down by the water. The slumped, froggish shapes of the fishfolk emerged in procession. Some carried in kelp netting the eerie flameless lamps that were the source of the light.
A few ventured forth to retrieve their dead, bearing them into the waves where they vanished from sight. Most formed a line along the surf’s edge and stood waiting. Their briny, rotten smell wafted thick in the air.
Five of them came closer, stopping halfway between the sea and the wall of logs and lumber. Of those five, two held lamps and two others held woven baskets. The one in the lead wore some kind of robe or mantle.
Inhuman though they were, these actions seemed familiar.
“They seek a truce,” Ypsvik said. “They want to talk.”
“Talk?” echoed Mjiska, remembering the gurgles and glottal grunts they had made. “How can they talk?”
“We’ll find out,” said Aerk.
“Are you mad?” Geira cried. “They’re monsters!”
“They killed our folk,” added Olaf.
“I know,” Aerk said, “but what else is there to do?”
No one had a good answer. Mjiska stepped up beside him. Aerk chose Njallan, Ypsvik and Dunvik to accompany them—Dunvik insisted that he would not let a little bump on the head keep him idle. The rest hung back at a prudent distance, watching in a tense, anxious silence.
Slowly, bearing torches, their group approached that of the fishfolk.
The robed leader, the emissary, lurched another few paces to meet them. The creature’s throat swelled like that of a bullfrog. Its gills stretched wide, pink and repellently moist. The tip of a long, thin tongue slithered the rim of its lipless mouth. It uttered a bubbling croak perhaps meant to be speech.
“Aerk…” Mjiska said in a low undertone.
“I feel it,” he said.
She felt it, too. A sense of something… a pressure, a presence… a mind… a mind so unlike theirs as to be abhorrent… questing for their own, questing to communicate…
Questing, and because she and Aerk were as they were, succeeding.
Its thoughts came to them not as words but vague meanings and impressions. Aerk, head tilted in curious but sickly fascination, concentrated intently on what the emissary tried to convey. Mjiska murmured to the others to stay their hands, to be patient, Aerk could understand it and so could she, and would tell them what they learned…
“They dwell in the deep trench past the black reef,” Aerk said. “They have dwelled there for centuries, in a great city, undying of age or sickness. But they would have peace with us. They would be our friends.”
“Friends,” muttered Dunvik, rubbing his head.
“They offer us wealth,” Mjiska said.
“Wealth?” asked Njallan.
The emissary gestured out across the harbor with an expansive sweep of one web-fingered hand. There, in the blue-green radiance of the strange kelp-netted lamps, the water thronged and teemed with fish. Silver bodies leaping, fins flashing, tails flicking, there were more fish than any of them had ever seen. Fish enough to feed kingdoms.
“The sea’s bounty,” Aerk explained. “Plentiful fishing. And—”
The two fishfolk with the woven baskets poured out their contents onto the ground at their feet. Metal gleamed on sand and shell… gold, a pale gold, glistening… gold worked into ornaments, circlets and crowns, bracers and arm-rings… the designs intricate yet loathsome… a golden fortune in treasure…
“Gold,” Mjiska said when her brother could not finish.
“What do they want in return?” Dunvik asked.
“For us to make sacrifice,” she said.
Ypsvik’s brows drew in. “Of pigs and goats?”
“No,” Aerk said.
“Of our own,” Mjiska said as the meanings and impressions took shape in her mind. “Twice a year, in the spring as now and again in autumn.”
“For that, they will favor us, and reward us richly.” Aerk gazed at the gold strewn before them.
“In exchange for the sea’s bounty of fish, and a fortune in gold,” said Njallan, thoughtfully.
In what was almost a manner of nonchalance, the emissary croaked again, just to add one more minor detail. Aerk’s brows rose.
“And we must each take one of them as a second husband or wife,” he said. “Our children by them will live as we are until they grow old, then join the others in the deep city and live forever.”
A moment passed as they all considered this.
“Forever,” mused Ypsvik, stroking his own grey beard.
The emissary regarded them with its bulging shark’s eyes. Behind it, the eastern sky brightened and the stars faded in anticipation of sunrise.
Marry with these creatures… mate with them, breed with them…
“They only can die by violence,” Mjiska said.
Aerk smiled. “Then let us not disappoint them.”
He drew his sword and rushed the emissary of the fishfolk.
With a fierce war-cry, Mjiska and the men attacked the attendants, who stumbled backward in slap-shuffling astonishment.
Mjiska struck at the nearest, who with a wet yelp of terror blocked the axe-blade with the woven basket. But the basket was sheared into pieces, and Mjiska’s next blow split the creature from sternum to groin.
A gush of cold jelly spewed out, a lumpy flood spilling over the sand. It was roe, the thing female and these her fishy eggs. Within the soft, whitish casings twitched and wriggled tiny wormlike forms. Revolted, Mjiska struck a third time. She lopped off the fishwoman’s head, sending it tumbling into the sloppy, miscarried mess.
Around her, the battle raged in earnest.
Their violent rejection of terms had caught the fishfolk by surprise. The ones waiting by the waterline had barely begun to react when the rest of Aerk’s people charged down to join in. They all came with weapons, the men with swords and spears and axes, the women with knives and cudgels, even the children with sticks and thrown stones.
A curved sliver of light, the sun’s shield edged in fire, appeared above the horizon. Dawnlight spread like melted butter across the waves, across the beach where once again blood and ichor rained from deadly wounds.
They fought to the death, Aerk’s people, fought for death, to bring it and to obtain it, to die in this way, free and glorious and on their own terms.
The fishfolk, unaccustomed to pain and death, panicked and fled, routed.
One by one, limping, bleeding, the survivors gathered around Aerk and Mjiska. Many had already gone to Odin’s hall—pretty Eyn among them, but Mjiska could not grieve for her and knew she would be with her soon enough.
They knew better than to hope they’d claimed victory; their foes were in far vaster numbers and would soon rally.
But the fishfolk did not rally, did not return in force.
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